As the leaves change, so too does the City Health Dashboard. This December we’re marking the end of the year with a data release, keeping with our promise to provide the most up-to-date data for our users.

This release includes:

• A new metric called Youth Not in Work or School

• Updated years of data for 16 metrics

• New access to our existing natality metrics and demographic breakdowns for hundreds of new cities

• Removal of the Preventive Services, 65+ metric

Read on to learn more about what we’ve added this month!

New Metrics

Youth Not in Work or School

Familial support, positive peer connections, and a supportive and safe school environment are crucial in helping young people develop their full potential and become independent healthy, adults. Youth who lack those factors may face more difficulty in the transition to adulthood. Additionally, this transition may also be hampered by social or structural factors, such as poverty, poor mental health, caregiver responsibilities, and many others. These negative experiences may hinder an adolescent’s ability to engage in education or the workforce and when young adults do not participate in school or the workforce, it can have lasting impacts on their health, well-being, and opportunity across the life course.

This is an increasingly important issue for many cities across the U.S., and was highlighted in the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. To meet the emerging needs of both city leaders and young adults we have added a new metric to the website called Youth Not in Work or School. This metric is sometimes referred to elsewhere as ‘disconnected youth.’ We define this metric as the percentage of youth 16-19 years who are neither working nor in school. It is available at the city and neighborhood level for all 1,103 cities. This metric also has demographic breakdowns by sex.

Read more about Youth Not in Work or School here.

Updated Data

New Years of Data

In this data release we introduce new years of data for 16 metrics. Updated metrics include 10 from the CDC’s PLACES Project (data through 2022), 3 focused on natality from the National Vital Statistics System (data through 2021), Park Access (data through 2023), and Walkability (data through 2024). We’ve also updated our current unemployment metric with new months of data through June 2024.

See below for a full list of metrics with updated data:

Expanded Access to Natality Data

When we first launched the Dashboard in 2018 we were only able to provide natality metrics for around 250 cities. In this data release we have tripled that number and added data for the Low Birthweight, Prenatal Care, and Teen Births metrics for roughly 500 cities that previously lacked natality data (data availability may vary depending on the metric, year, and city size). These are the most granular data available from the CDC.

We have also added new city-level race and ethnicity breakdowns for the Low Birthweight, Prenatal Care, and Teen Births metrics for around 700 cities. We previously used county-level race and ethnicity data for these cities.

New Demographic Categories

In recent years the U.S. Census has changed how its surveys capture race and ethnicity data to better align with how people see themselves. This includes allowing people to identify as being of more than one race and expanding the available racial and ethnic categories that individuals can choose from. The Dashboard’s demographic maps and tables, available from each city’s City Overview page, have been updated to include two new categories – Other Alone, and Two or More Races – to reflect these changes.

Removed Preventive Services Metric

Following recommendations from the US Preventive Services Task Force, the CDC’s PLACES Project has discontinued their ‘Preventive Service Use for Older Adults’. The Dashboard has therefore also removed the Preventive Services, 65+ metric (which is derived from PLACES) from the website, including all multi-year data. These data will also no longer be available from the downloadable .csv files or the API.

If you have any questions on what we’ve updated in this data release, please do not hesitate to reach out to us by emailing us at [email protected]. We also hope you'll join us on Thursday, December 12th at 3:00pm for Virtual Office Hours where we'll provide an overview on what we've updated and take a deeper dive into our newest metric, Youth Not in Work or in School! Register for Virtual Office Hours here.

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